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Food Security - National Agricultural Biotechnology Council ...

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The crisis is a wake-up call, the moment where we recognise that “business asusual” would consign us to a gradual decline…This is Europe’s moment of truth.It is the time to be bold and ambitious…Our short-term priority is a successfulexit from the crisis…To achieve a sustainable future, we must already lookbeyond the short term. Europe needs to get back on track [through] three mutuallyreinforcing priorities:• Smart growth—developing an economy based on knowledge and innovation.• Sustainable growth—promoting a more resource-efficient, greener and morecompetitive economy.• Inclusive growth—fostering a high-employment economy delivering social andterritorial cohesion.In brief: The need is for economic growth from knowledge-driven innovation, within agreener, sustainable environment that is inclusive and achieves social cohesion.The second example is from PepsiCo and its 2009 Corporate Citizenship Report,Performance with Purpose: Investing in Sustainable Growth. It takes a roughly similar approachhighlighting three inter-related themes:• Human sustainability, focusing on healthy products;• Environmental sustainability, focusing on water and greener production processes;and• Talent sustainability, focusing on staff training and skill development within adiverse and inclusive culture.In other words: Healthy products, from sustainable processes made by skilled andempowered people.These are interesting formulations that, in many ways, embody what member stateswant FAO to achieve. Both represent similar themes on the value of what is produced,they acknowledge the centrality of environmental sustainability as a concurrent objective,and they include social concerns of inclusion, capacity and cohesion. How do they—andthe forthcoming presentations at this conference—converge in meeting the component,inter-related parts of the food-security challenge? I would suggest three overarchingprinciples.Win-Win SolutionsFirst, we need to combine two or more simultaneous objectives. Forget trade-offs; weare looking for win-win or triple-win solutions that link drought relief, for example, tolonger-term development, dealing with short-term disasters in ways that enhance longtermpotential and reduce recurrent vulnerabilities. We need to increase production andproductivity while increasing sustainability. This is very clear in the work on agricultureand climate change; we need solutions that increase production, reduce vulnerability toextreme weather events and mitigate the impact of climate change. This is the conceptunderpinning “climate smart” agriculture that has the objective of looking for solutionsthat simultaneously increase productivity, reduce vulnerability and increase resilience toGustafson31

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